Margins/Marges/Margini

Introduzione

C. Bruna Mancini — 2025-01-07

Creative Writing and Intersemiotic Translation in the English Language Classroom: Turning Shapes and Colours into Flash Fiction

Linda Barone — 2025-01-07

This paper explores the integration of creative writing and intersemiotic translation as a multifaceted approach to English language learning. The translation between different semiotic systems (in this case from visual to textual), combined with creative writing, offers a rich pedagogical framework for engaging language learners in deep, meaningful interaction with the target language. The methodology employed a blended approach, incorporating Task-Based Language Teaching, Project-Based Learning, and learning by doing, wherein learners systematically progressed through a series of gradual activities designed to culminate in the composition of a concise narrative inspired by a visual artwork. Participants in the project were advanced-level students in their second year of the bachelor’s degree program in Foreign Languages and Cultures.Findings indicate that the students demonstrated significant improvement in both language proficiency and intercultural competence. Furthermore, the study found that these activities fostered a deeper emotional and cognitive engagement with the learning material, facilitating a more personal approach to language acquisition.Incorporating creative and multimodal approaches into the curriculum can lead to more effective and immersive language learning experiences. This study seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on multimodal pedagogies and opens new avenues for exploring how creative writing and intersemiotic translation can be exploited to support language and linguistics learners in an increasingly interconnected and semiotically complex world.

Gender Marginalisation in Indian Society: Inequalities and Cultural Exclusion of Indian Women as Depicted in Indian Fiction in English

Monali Chatterjee — 2025-01-07

Indian fiction in English prominently demonstrates the imposing presence of marginalisation founded upon gender. Gender Marginalisation is an extensively recognized social concern, accentuating the anguish of gender discrimination, oppression and subordination in all societies. For this research, two short stories by eminent Indian stalwart writers have been selected. Amrita Pritam (1919- 2005) is regarded as one of the forerunners of Indian women writers of the twentieth century. Her works asserting her identity in society have established her as a chief proponent of feminist writing. Her celebrated story “270 Crore Heartbeats” illustrates several gender marginalities that weigh down upon our society even today. In contrast to Pritam, Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) also theorises through his literature some of the crucial gender-marginal concerns of his day that were governed by rigid social conditioning and are still prevalent in the present day. His short story, “Profit and Loss” demonstrates the hideous repercussions that spell havoc in the lives of people who that coerced to follow the male-dominated norms of society. Both these authors have been versatile visionary thinkers in their own right. Yet, their critique of social malpractices makes a strong statement in theorizing gender marginalities of society. This paper evaluates and contrasts how both these writers have flagrantly critiqued the social institution of marriage and how the marginalization based on gender can gnaw at the foundation of any society and destroy is cultural values of solidarity.

Shifting the Spatial Representation of Indigenous Peoples in Translation: The Case Study of Lonely Planet’s Canada in Italian

Maria Cristina Seccia — 2025-01-07

This article analyzes the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and space as represented in the Lonely Planet tourist guidebook Canada and in its Italian translation. As one of the first mediating links between tourists and tourist destinations, guidebooks play a crucial role in circulating the imagery of cultures (Gilbert 1999, 283; Callahan 2011, 97; Maci 2020, 177). Significantly, as sites of ideological struggle, their translation poses particular issues when it comes to the representation of historically marginalized cultures, as in the case of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada, whose close and enduring relationship with the land has played a crucial role in constructing their own identity (Campbell et al. 2003, 16). While most historians argue that Indigenous Peoples have inhabited present-day Canada from time immemorial (see, for instance, Carter 1999; Campbell et al. 2003; Dickason et al. 2006/2023), others – from a Eurocentric perspective – trace their presence back to a specific time in history, presenting them as the first immigrants (see, for instance, Coates 2004, 34-7). Linking the Indigenous Peoples’ presence in present-day Canada with migration, however, effaces the consequences that they suffered following both the arrival of European colonizers and the later waves of immigration (Monture-Angus 1995; Stasiulis and Bakan 1997; Lawrence 2002; Sharma 2006; Ahluwaia 2012). In light of the ideologies underpinning the representation of Indigenous Peoples, this article will examine – through a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to translation (Matthiessen 2014) – the transitivity shifts which occur within the experiential mode of meaning that is concerned with how human experience is constructed in a text (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004/2014). This will reveal any shifts in the interpretation offered by the target text, thus shedding light on the relationship between translation and ideology.

Apparition, Time, and the Movement of The Chimes

Sara Malton — 2025-01-07

This contribution is a reading of Dickens’s The Chimes as a story of deprivation and starvation – of the mind, spirit, and the body. Throughout his fiction Dickens frequently presents his reader with a version of the moment in which one his character witnesses his own death, like in A Christmas Carol, The Signalman, A Tale of Two Cities. However, in The Chimes this episode is peculiarly dramatized given the text’s focus on starvation, deprivation, and exile. In fact, the protagonist’s encounter with his own dead body renders emphatically the degree to which the physical and the psychological are intimately linked; the deprivation, the starvation that necessarily drives such individuals onward from place to place produces a kind of psychological exile. At the end, all the forms of movement here represented are a function of the industrial, utilitarian context that Dickens’s tale seeks to indict. They underscore the invisibility of the poor as well as their exclusion from the regular movements of time that determine cultural ritual and the patterns of daily living, exiled as they are into a world of chaos.

Living (in) the Margin: The Intersectionality of Language and Body in the Ballroom Culture. A Preliminary Study

Roberto Esposito — 2025-01-07

The sociological and legal recognition of the intrinsic relationship between social categorisations and the perpetuation of discrimination and oppression is encapsulated by the concept of ‘intersectionality’. This multifaceted notion, serving as both an analytical challenge and an interpretive framework, additionally encompasses the idea of a margin where individuals inhabiting the juncture of divergent social spaces converge and, in doing so, engender an innovative dimension – an interstitial realm transcending fictitious boundaries. Building upon this conceptual foundation, the current study aims to shed light on the so-called ‘Ballroom Culture’ as a compelling illustration of this perspective, with a specific emphasis on its linguistic facets, both on a verbal and non-verbal level. From the early 1960s, ballrooms have gathered marginalised individuals who fought those rules that impeded them from expressing their identity. This social context unavoidably exerted an influence on language, as the convergence of diverse cultures and (hi)stories facilitated the intertwining of multiple discourses. The linguistic outcome emerging from this intersectional margin/space was the emergence of a language that transcends any
difference of origins and identity. As this is true for both language and body language, this article first explains what intersectionality is, how it works, and what is its relationship with language. Then, it retraces Ballroom Culture’s history and traditions, which have always revolved around verbal and non-verbal display of self or other’s identity meant to make individuals feel relieved from social discrimination. Finally, the study shows some popular examples of intersectional language also to hypothesise which methodology/ies would better fit linguistic research addressing the contemporary and mediated version of the Ballroom Culture.

Living on the Margins: Secluded Characters in Southern Literature

Eva Gourdoux — 2025-01-07

The South of the United States has often been looked at as a marginal region by historians and literary critics alike. The works of white Southern authors like William Faulkner (1897-1962), Flannery O’Connor (1925-1965) and Eudora Welty (1909-2001) have been associated with this so-called marginality, despite the writers’ efforts to keep clear from this inescapable reputation. More often than not, the unwanted marginality pervades the novels and short stories of these authors: misfits, disabled and reclusive characters people their stories. In some of their works, Faulkner, O’Connor and Welty depict characters who defy the norm, whether it be through their bodies or their actions. The secluded way of life of these characters tends to amplify their abnormality and anchors them deeper into the margins of their homes, in the recesses of Mississippi, in the Georgia countryside or on the outskirts of the fictional land of Yoknapatawpha. This study seeks to analyze the marginality of reclusive characters in white Southern literature – more precisely in selected works by Faulkner, O’Connor and Welty – and underlines the liminal aspect of margins. The first part of this article focuses on the depiction of abnormality in these works: whether they challenge the social norms or even the bodily norms by way of grotesque traits, the authors’ secluded characters embody the margin. The last part demonstrates the paradoxical realistic power of the margins, as they allow for the surprising representation of unamable taboos. The secluded characters of the works under study are marginal figures in a seemingly marginal world, but actually use marginality to cross boundaries.

Marginal Voices and Liminal Spaces: Helen Maria Williams’ Translation of de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie

Anastasia Parise — 2025-01-07

This paper deals with Helen Maria Williams’ preface to and translation of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788). Both paratext and translation allowed Williams to comment on her practice and express her opinions on the socio-political context in which she lived. Kathryn Batchelor’s (2018) paratextual framework and Silvia Kadiu’s (2019) reflexive methodology will be first applied to the analysis of the preface and then to the additions, omissions and alterations of meaning that are found in the target text but not discussed in the paratext. The paper will eventually outline Williams’ approach to translation and highlight her agency as a translator.

Serializing Nationalism: Indian Soaps and Border Defense

Rosina Pastore — 2025-01-07

Since its first airing in 2016 the Indian tv series Nāgin (female serpent) was a success. Featuring a shape-shifting female serpent and her fictional entry in the human world to seek revenge, the nāgin was even more appealing because of her being a fervent devotee of the Hindu god Śiva. While the first five seasons of the supernatural soap opera were eventually a variation on the theme of the competition between the nāgin as newlywed daughter-inlaw and her mother-in-law, the sixth season, that premiered in February 2022, introduced a novel element in the plot. The nāgin is not anymore to avenge herself because of a personal reason, rather her mission is to defend her country from internal and external forces that attempt to undermine its integrity. A nāgin can be seen as a symbol of transformation, as she crosses the margins between the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘human’ dimensions at will. This paper aims to shed light on how this fluid figure is made the defender of national borders, conceived increasingly as unchanging and non-negotiable by nationalist narratives. It will investigate the multiple modalities in which border defense is blended into the plot of the series, as it nourishes in this way a form of serialized nationalism.

Corpi che contano? Corpi, sessualità e orientamenti divergenti nella narrativa e nella fiction da Mona Caird a Ryan Murphy

Cesare Pozzuoli — 2025-01-07

La storia dei corpi, o per meglio dire delle rappresentazioni della corporeità, del corpo sessuato attraversa come un fil rouge una sostanziosa parte della vicenda, complicatissima, della cultura occidentale. Il corpo è un vettore di significanti e significati, è lo strumento primario con il quale ci si presenta, come soggetti, sia all’interno dello spazio pubblico sia della sfera privata. La corporeità assume, a seconda delle epoche, simbolismi e significati sempre nuovi e diversi ma senza dubbio va notato come sia soprattutto l’associazione semiotico-filosofica tra corporeità e differenza sessuale, tra corpo e genere a risultare pregna di implicazioni. La storia dei corpi è infatti in primis una storia della sessualità e delle pratiche culturali legate alla sessualità. Al contempo, per tale motivo, il corpo sessuato ha sempre agito e continua ad agire come un limite, un margine che in alcuni casi si intende valicare, spesso con fatica, e che in altri è una barriera dietro la quale ci si trincera. Seguendo questo impianto teorico il saggio proposto intende indagare come attraverso la rappresentazione letteraria e la fiction tra la fine del XIX secolo e la contemporaneità, facendo particolare riferimento alla cultura anglosassone, i corpi sessuati, feticci di sessualità e orientamenti ‘divergenti’ abbiano di volta in volta svolto la funzione di limite, di gabbia o di margine invalicabile. Come si supera questo limite? Perché il corpo sessuato ‘non conforme’ diventa strumento di marginalità? Queste sono le domande di ricerca alla base del presente lavoro che presenta un impianto teorico squisitamente interdisciplinare e indaga nei linguaggi diversi della letteratura e della fiction televisiva cogliendone i significati culturali, pedagogici e filosofici.

On the Edge of Self-discovery: Water, Spaces and Sense of Belonging in the novel Weathering by Lucy Wood

Francesca Spina — 2025-01-07

According to ancient Celt mythology, water draws a line between this world and the “otherworld”, an alternative reality inhabited by deities, spirits, or the souls of the departed (Monaghan, 2004: 469). Thus, water – and flowing water in particular – becomes an interstitial space that acquires several binomial meanings: life and death, destruction and rebirth, safety, and catastrophe (Arikan, 2014: 213). To inhabit a river is to dwell on the edges, on the borders of two opposite realities that merge within this interstitial fluid space. To reside in this hybrid third space is to be part of both worlds, while at the same time being part of neither. This is precisely the condition experienced by Pearl, one of the three characters enclosed in the pages of Weathering, the first novel published by Cornish author Lucy Wood. After her passing, Pearl remains trapped between the worlds of life and death, and dwells in the flowing waters of a river in an unnamed British town. Indeed, it is on these margins that she first meets her granddaughter, Pepper; and it is by breaking free from these margins and flooding the house where she once lived, that Pearl finally meets again with her daughter Ada. By focusing on the symbolic significance of water and on the meanings associated with the concept of ‘house, through Lucy Wood’s novel and through hints to her short story Notes from the House Spirits, this paper intends to analyse how margins can become a place of reunion and self-(re)discovery: a third and interstitial space where two worlds physically and emotionally come together into one.

Out of Margins: Exploring Post-humanity in Klara and the Sun

Carla Fusco — 2025-01-07

Seventeen years after Never Let Me Go Ishiguro deals with another dystopian story whose protagonist is an android. An artificial intelligence endowed with both sensitivity and extraordinary ability to observe the world around her. Klara is meant to be a ‘friend’ for only those who can afford her. Playing the role of a friend, she can observe many aspects of people’s behavior in particular concerning personal relationships. Like in the previous novels, Ishiguro uses an I-first person narration to deeply investigate human love capacity. The novel seems to ask some crucial questions: how willing are you to compromise for love? What are the limits of the human heart? How much are we all dependent on technology and also in interacting with each other? My aim is to answer these questions through a close, hermeneutic reading of the text also considering the context in the view of the studies on post-humanism.

Mena Mitrano, La Critica Sconfinata. Introduzione al pensiero di Susan Sontag (Quodlibet Studio, 2022)

Francesco Di Perna — 2025-01-07

James Moran, Modernists and the Theatre: The Drama of W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Methuen Drama, 2022)

Andrea Lupi — 2025-01-07

Kalyani Thakur Charal, Poems of Chandalini (Birujatio Sahitya Sammilani, 2024)

Monami Nag — 2025-01-07

Shahram Khosravi, Io sono confine (Elèuthera, 2019)

Maria Fiorella Suozzo — 2025-01-07

Francesco Benozzo, Sciamanica: Poems from the Borders of the Worlds (Forum, 2023)

Alan Wildeman — 2025-01-07

Pratica teatrale e video arte al tempo della pandemia Intervista a Raffaele Di Florio

Giuseppe Capalbo — 2025-01-07